TinyML for Acoustic Anomaly Detection in IoT Sensor Networks

📅 2026-03-27
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a lightweight TinyML-based anomaly sound detection system tailored for microcontrollers to address the latency, high energy consumption, and privacy concerns associated with cloud-centric processing in IoT acoustic sensing. By extracting Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) directly on the edge device and deploying a compressed and optimized neural network classifier, the system achieves high-accuracy, low-power, real-time local anomaly detection for the first time. Evaluated on the UrbanSound8K dataset, the approach attains 91% accuracy and a balanced F1-score of 0.91, demonstrating a practical trade-off between privacy preservation, energy efficiency, and real-time performance. This solution offers a viable pathway for scalable deployment in resource-constrained IoT applications.

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📝 Abstract
Tiny Machine Learning enables real-time, energy-efficient data processing directly on microcontrollers, making it ideal for Internet of Things sensor networks. This paper presents a compact TinyML pipeline for detecting anomalies in environmental sound within IoT sensor networks. Acoustic monitoring in IoT systems can enhance safety and context awareness, yet cloud-based processing introduces challenges related to latency, power usage, and privacy. Our pipeline addresses these issues by extracting Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients from sound signals and training a lightweight neural network classifier optimized for deployment on edge devices. The model was trained and evaluated using the UrbanSound8K dataset, achieving a test accuracy of 91% and balanced F1-scores of 0.91 across both normal and anomalous sound classes. These results demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of embedded acoustic anomaly detection for scalable and responsive IoT deployments.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Acoustic Anomaly Detection
TinyML
IoT Sensor Networks
Edge Computing
Environmental Sound Monitoring
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

TinyML
acoustic anomaly detection
edge computing
MFCC
IoT sensor networks
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